Yesterday in my column I said I would take the short odds that if Trump didn’t show up at the Wednesday night debate, that his poll numbers would begin to drop under 50%.
Guess what? I don’t have to wait until Wednesday because last week a New Hampshire poll had Trump at 49%, which is 9 points lower than this same pollster (Emerson College) reported for Trump back in March.
Trump still has a humongous lead over the rest of the GOP field in New Hampshire, particularly because DeSantis really seems to be sliding down the tubes. But even though Trump has a 40-point lead over the closest challenger, Chris Christie with 9 points, the really significant takeaway from this survey is that for the first time, more than half the potential GOP voters in New Hampshire don’t want Trump.
That doesn’t mean they won’t vote for Trump if he gets through the primaries and ends up on the 2024 ballot running again against Joe. But the problem that he and any other GOP Presidential candidate has is that you can’t win a national election running as the GOP candidate if you only pick up GOP votes.
Right now, registered Democrats number 48.3 million, registered Republicans number 37 million. Another 42 million are registered for some other party or are registered to vote without defining themselves party-wise. There are also 18 states, including critical battleground states like Michigan and Wisconsin, which keep the number of registered voters secret and have ‘open’ primaries, which means that any registered voter can vote in either primary, whether he or she will vote that way in the general election or not.
In other words, voter registration by party doesn’t really tell you how things will work out in the general election, but it’s a good indication of the general mood and beliefs of the electorate, nevertheless. In the last six national elections – 2000 through 2020 – the Democrats got million 392.5 votes; the GOP got 370.5 million votes. More important if you compare electoral votes between those states which have voted blue in the last six elections versus those states that have always voted the red, the Democrats begin every national campaign with 197 electoral votes, the GOP starts off with 156 EV’s.
As for Trump’s one successful political campaign in 2016, the vote totals clearly indicate that he didn’t win that contest so much as she who shall remain nameless lost the race. In the 2012 election, the vote total in the three critical swing states – PA, MI, WI – was 7,175,828 for Obama, 6,203,656 for Romney. In 2016, she got 6,577,816 votes, the Trumper got 6,655,560 votes.
There’s an old rule in politics which says you begin every campaign with the number of votes your party got in the last campaign and build from there. Which is what Trump did in 2016 when he increased the vote total in those three states by a whole, big one percent. Meanwhile, she who shall remain nameless reduced the 2012 popular vote in those ‘must win’ states by almost twelve percent.
Because my friends in the fake news echo chamber use Trump’s so-called ‘threat’ to democracy to keep themselves in business, these numbers are always overlooked. But the next time you want to get all hot and bothered about how Trump’s got this big ‘army’ just waiting for his command to stage yet another attempted coup, you might want to refer to these numbers again.
The truth is that Trump was an accidental President in every sense of the word, which is why these new poll numbers strongly suggest that the accident won’t happen again. What will happen by this year’s end is that most of the current GOP candidates will drop out because once the primaries get serious you need to start spending the kind of money that most of these bozos don’t really have.
When clowns like Hutchinson, Haley, Burgum and Hurd call it quits, those 50 percent of Republican voters who don’t want Trump will have to coalesce around someone else. And once anyone begins to pick up the ABT (anyone but Trump) votes, Mister Orange Shithead will really begin to fade.
Which is too bad for the simple reason that Joe’s best chance of winning another term just happens to be based on running against Trump. Even an amateur pundit like Leonard Mermelstein can figure that one out.
Leonard Mermelstein’s my cat.
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